Thaindian News

UNITED NATIONS (BNO NEWS) – A United Nations official on Thursday warned that preserving the world’s biodiversity vital for economic development.

Saving the world’s myriad diverse species, many of which are being lost to human activity at an unprecedented rate that some experts put at 1,000 times the natural progression, is vital not just for environmental reasons but for the economic well-being of humankind, UN Development Programme (UNDP) Environment and Energy Group Director Veerle Vandeweerd said.

Stressing the importance of the UN naming 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity, she cited former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who in 1993 said that the library of life is on fire.

“The reason why UNDP is so involved in biodiversity and why we think it is so important is indeed because biodiversity is not about greenness, biodiversity is about the economy, and biodiversity is about the life of people at the community level,” Vandeweerd said.

In launching the Year, the UN has stressed that the variety of life on Earth is vital to sustaining the living networks and systems that provide health, wealth, food and fuel.

“Humans are part of nature’s rich diversity and have the power to protect or destroy it,” the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which is hosted by the UN Environment Programme said.

The Convention, which opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, entered into force at the end of 1993 and now has 193 Parties, is based on the premise that the world’s diverse ecosystems purify the air and the water that are the basis of life, stabilize and moderate the Earth’s climate, renew soil fertility and pollinate plants.

Yet human activity is causing this diversity to be lost are irreversibly at a greatly accelerated rate. As an example, Vandeweerd cited marine species. “In fact, the last frontier of the world lies in the ocean and it’s sad to see that we are destroying our oceans so quickly before we even know which biodiversity is harboured in the ocean,” she said.

“For us there is no doubt that the Year of Biodiversity hopefully should become a year when we pay much more attention to biodiversity and conservation… where the world will pay at least as much attention to biodiversity as to climate change,” she concluded.